The Go Programming Language
by Alan A. A. Donovan, Brian W. Kernighan · first published 2015
50% recommend48% neutral3% critical
Why HN recommends it
Concise, thorough introduction to Go with practical, non-toy examples and clear prose, teaching idiomatic style. Suits working programmers, especially those coming from C or Java, who want solid grounding.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
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I can highly recommend "The Go Programming Language". I find it extremely well written, and worth every penny. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0134190440
on “Go by Example” ↗"The Go Programming Language" by Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan: http://gopl.io
on “Seven years of Go” ↗Like others in this thread, this is more (only, in fact) about programming but I found The Go Programming Language to be an absolutely perfect introduction to Go with fantastic examples and succinct prose. It's beautifully typeset as well, which doesn't hurt. http://www.gopl.io ISBN: 978-0134190440
on “Ask HN: What's the best computer science book you've read recently?” ↗…nice step by step introductory guide through the language. _ 2. Go by Example: https://gobyexample.com/ >> A concise collection of fundamental concepts, expressions, and implementations. _ 3. The Go Programming Language: http://www.gopl.io/ >> The text by two authors of the language. You may view as the "KnR" for C but for Go. >> It has end of chapter problems and the solutions are hosted on github: >>> https://github.com/adonovan/gopl.io/…
on “Show HN: Gophercises – Coding Exercises for Budding Gophers” ↗…from investing more time into it, though: Chapter 17 of the book, which spends a great deal of time trying to advertise why its OOP support is so impoverished. In comparison, Donovan & Kernighan's The Go Programming Language is much more honest about the (many) misfeatures of Go. That being said, already existing libraries and Rust's tooling are excellent, and so I'll surely return to the language. Not because it has no…
on “Rust has a static “garbage collector”” ↗…Rust's memory management to other languages that the reader might know. The largest shortcoming of the book is the lack of exercises. That said, I don't think any of the books is as good as K&R or The Go Programming Language yet. The Kernighan books are lucid and contain a lot of small, but useful, exercises/practical examples. This gives a stronger sense of accomplishment while working through the book.
on “Rust and SPARK: Software Reliability for Everyone (2017)” ↗Been a while since I worked with Go but I'm considering it for an upcoming project. Is there any word on a new, updated version of "The Go Programming Language" (Donovan, Kernighan) to cover all the new features since then? I really enjoyed working through that book. If not: Any tips for a good resource to really get up to date with the new additions/changes…
on “Upcoming Features in Go 1.18” ↗The blogger has completely missed the entire purpose of Go. I suggest anyone who actually wants info one way or the other to read the Preface in Alan Donovan and Brian Kernighan's "The Go Programming Language". You will then understand why Go is the way it is and why all the negative points (in his mind) this blogger listed, are not in the language.
on “Why Go Is Not Good (2014)” ↗Perhaps one of these resources can show more advanced use cases: https://github.com/golang/go/wiki/Books Have you read The Go Programming Language by Donovan and Kernighan? - Book Site: http://www.gopl.io/ - Book Example Source Code: https://github.com/adonovan/gopl.io/
on “Go by Example” ↗…good books that Kernighan has been involved with: The C Programming Language (by Kernighan and Ritchie), The Unix Programming Environment (by Kernighan and Pike), The AWK Programming Language and The Go Programming Language. I have three of the books in hard copy (and had the first two books for years, in fact, bought multiple copies, because the earlier ones wore out); the only one I do not have is the AWK book. Along with…
on “Technical Writing: Learning from Kernighan” ↗I'm sure there are many actual professionals using Go. Not just script kiddies. I happen to be learning Go coming from a C background. I find "The Go Programming Language" by Donovan and Kernighan exemplary and the decades of experience that went into the language really show.
on “Practical Go: Real-world advice for writing maintainable Go programs” ↗…like it if you give it a shot: https://www.amazon.com/Code-Reading-Open-Source-Perspective/... Effective Java by Joshua Bloch has code snippets that are very well-written, as are the examples in The Go Programming Language by Donovan et. al. I read practically all the code in Effective Java, and a lot of the examples in The Go Programming Language (I keep dipping into this book every now and then as I have to learn some…
on “Ask HN: Courses explaining well-written codebases?” ↗…https://go.dev/tour/welcome/1 - Effective Go - https://go.dev/doc/effective_go - Go by Example - https://gobyexample.com/ - The Little Go Book - https://www.openmymind.net/The-Little-Go-Book/ - "The Go Programming Language" by Alan A.A. Donovan and Brian W. Kernighan - Go 101 - https://go101.org/
on “Ghostly is a simple, lightweight, and fast full-stack framework for Golang” ↗…Language" - Kernighan & Aho - "The Elements of Programming Style" - Kernighan & Plauger - "The Unix Programming Environment" - Kernighan & Pike - "The Practice of Programming" - Kernighan & Pike - "The Go Programming Language" - Kernighan & Donovan
on “The Go Programming Language by Brian W. Kernighan, Alan Donovan” ↗Just to throw my two cents in here: my favorite technical book is the fairly recent Go Programming Language by Donovan & Kernighan (www.gopl.io). It's very readable and has _excellent_ exercises to do as you work through the book.
on “The most mentioned books on Stack Overflow” ↗